I noticed this while getting dressed Sunday to go to my folks for Easter. We have a small TV in the bathroom with rabbit ears to get local programming, such as the morning news and stuff. Well Wife had it on PBS I think and the show was one of these where some person is off on some far away country and they are invited into this random person's house and before long they are feasting on some homemade food and all is well with the world. This always seems to happen, no matter where the people are visiting. I was watching this late 20's kid on YouTube and he was talking about visiting the slums of India and again, the people were about as friendly as can be. I know that there must be bad people around and I am too cautious to ever roam the earth like this myself, but time and time again, the people traveling seem to get received by the people of whatever foreign lands pretty easy.
Why then when it is on a government scale, does everything get muddled and fucked up? Is it that people with fancy titles can't be as friendly as the local poorer residents? I've even seen people visiting North Korea on YouTube and the random local person on the street isn't trying to start a war. They are curious of the strangers, they are proud to show off their homes, they want you to try their local cuisine. My pessimistic brother would say this is all a staged production and I would agree if it was only seen on PBS or one of the other TV channels, but when it comes to YouTube, it might be one random dude with a phone making videos.
When I realized Boy's GF grew up for a time in Mexico, I had questions of interest, such as did you have the Flintstones on TV? She said yes and it was called Los Picapiedras, this seems silly, but as an example, when someone is different, we still want to know how they are somehow the same. We went down a list of cartoons and they had them all and she watched most of the same ones we watched, although to be honest Fred who came across as a buffoon to us, in the Spanish version, he was a guy always in a bad mood, so there were some differences, according to her.
Maybe this is a little off topic, but I don't get how we can get along just fine with other people until we hear from our leaders and in their reality, we have to hate this group because of this and this group hates us because of that. Meanwhile, if you go down where the real mixing happens, such as at borders, there is so much mixing that has already happened, that people become interconnected and part of each other's communities, even without wanting it.
I remember an old coworker who used to travel a lot to the middle east and especially Jerusalem, his stories always seemed to be that Palestineans were friendlier and easier to get along with than the Israelis and I thought the Israelis were our allies, so this always seemed weird to me.
I am pretty sure that my brother's will just continue calling me a bleeding heart liberal, but that is not what I am going for. It just seems that if left alone, one on one, we could get along with most anyone on the planet, we might need a translator, but better a translator than a president defining who is our friend and who is our enemy.
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